Sunday, March 31, 2013

This post explains how to configure munin on a single Ubuntu 13.04 server that uses nginx.

Monitoring is supposed to save time by debugging and predicting / avoiding catastrophes. However, setting up munin on Ubuntu was a time-consuming trial-and-error process for me. The official instructions and various blog posts that cover this topic skip important steps, such as having monit's FastCGI processes start automatically at boot time. I have documented the setup that worked for me, hoping that others can reuse my work.

Ubuntu packages

Run the following command to install the packages needed for munin.sudo apt-get install munin munin-node spawn-fcgi libcgi-fast-perl

This configuration assumes that you have a DNS entry set aside for reaching the monit pages. I have separate DNS entries for all my applications, and they're all CNAMEs for the (same) machine that they're running on.

Short Bio

Victor Costan got infected with a passion for coding at the age of 10, and proceeded to earn a M.Eng in Computer science from MIT. Victor also holds a B.S. in Management that he pursued as he fell prey to the belief that great software requires legions of developers manipulating bloated code bases in repetitive ways. Thanks to Paul Graham's essays, Ruby, and Rails, he re-discovered the joy of coding, and came back from the dark ways of management.

Nowadays, Victor is still crazy about building software that he can impress his friends with, but he also dreams of contributing to making coding even more enjoyable. Victor likes developing mobile and Web 2.0 applications, and occasionally enjoys building some distributed systems behind the apps. When he is not coding, you will most likely find him reading up on some new programming language or software development technique.

At times, Victor likes to pretend he's mentally sane, and can be seen catching up with friends, watching a movie, or exploring Boston.